Customer Reviews

Arnold Schoenberg: Moses Und Aron/Chamber Symphony No. 2, Op. 38

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Once upon a time, there was a young, aspiring composer/pianist who loved music more than anything or anyone in the world. He played and listened to all sorts of music -- but for a long time he failed to understand Schoenberg's atonal and twelve-tone works. His favorites then were Beethoven and Brahms. But one evening he turned on the radio and heard the most intense, concentrated yet moving music he had ever encountered. He listened to the end to find out what the piece was. Lo and behold, it was Schoenberg's Moses und Aron -- specifically the second half of Act II, consisting of the Dance before the Golden Calf and the piercing dialogue between Moses and Aron that follows.

I offer you this little story simply to show how immensely moved I was when I first encountered Schoenberg's Moses und Aron that night. Schoenberg's music is rigorous, tight, austere, and demanding, yet there is beauty throughout it all. One doesn't need to know about post-tonal motivic development or serial procedures to love Schoenberg's music. I certainly didn't know a thing about the structure of atonal music when I listened to Moses und Aron that night! Yet it was love upon first listening, and now, ten years later, Moses und Aron is still my favorite work of Schoenberg. It's true that Schoenberg's music is not for everyone -- but then again, I know many so-called classical musicians who don't like Beethoven, or Mozart, or Wagner, or Bach (!). Aesthetics is a personal matter these days, but too many people love Schoenberg wholeheartedly for anyone with a heart and a head to question that he was one of the 20th century's musical titans.

And, believe it or not, this is the very recording that I heard over the radio so many years ago! As a performance, I still think it's superb, but it isn't an outright top choice. There aren't any "perfect" recordings of Moses und Aron out there (IMHO). Here are my thoughts: Michael Gielen recorded a performance for Philips (nla I believe) which is so intense that it's an emotional drain to listen to (one could almost say that it's bombastic), but it isn't entirely accurate in terms of pitch, and not as clear as Boulez. Solti's recording is OK but rather murky in its textures. Boulez's second recording of Moses und Aron on DG is perhaps the best all-around version at the moment -- it's more dramatic and intense than his Sony recording (though it doesn't quite reach the level of Gielen), more clear than Solti, and more accurate than Gielen. However, these discs -- Boulez's first recording of the work -- are still very good, especially if your budget is limited.

I thank Arnold Schoenberg for creating such wonderful pieces of music for anyone who is willing to listen. For those who are not, they deserve only pity.

For decades spoil sports like the one below have been attacking Schoenberg's 12 tone system, saying, for example, that his music has no relation to "natural acoustics" and to the way "human beings make sense of sound". Well, last I checked, I'm a human being, one who happens to love this music, and I join musicians and music enthusiasts around the globe in praise of Schoenberg's music. The music of a "mediocre musical talent" doesn't last 50 years after his death. A talentless hack is forgotten. Schoenberg hasn't been and never will be.

For those of you with open minds, I heartily recommend this recording of Moses und Aron as a classic. Boulez' approach emphasizes the music's many contrapuntal layers with his trademark interpretive clarity and painstaking attention to timbral detail. The ra files above will give you a good idea of this recording's merits. For those who prefer more passion than precision, a good alternate is Sir Georg Solti's version from the early 80s. Solti brings out Schoenberg's connection to the romantic tradition of composers like Johannes Brahms. Solti's is a dramatic interpretation that emphasizes "the line" rather than momentary detail. Unfortunately, Solti's performance is not offered at Amazon and may have been deleted; I hope not.

Shoenberg's music is not for everyone, but then there's a lot in music that isn't for everyone. Try to accept that, though you may not connect with this composer, there are many who honestly do, and you may be missing something.

Moses and Aron does not, perhaps, contain all of the pathos of an opera such as Wozzeck, but it is a great work in its own right. The overall mood of the piece reflects Schoenberg's awe towards God. Schoenbergs' representation of the voice of God, for example, is ingenious. The chorus supports their voice on various pitches, creating a massive tone cluster. The sound evokes wind, but also power and majesty. There is little sense of dramtic progression (and schoenberg never finished the third act, so there could also be no climax) but the work revolves around the God of the Isrealites rather than the Isrealites themselves, making the personalities of the characters less important to the meaning of the work. It is a revealing look into the mind of Schoenberg and his spiritual ideas, perhaps more than any of his other works. Boulez's direction of the BBC orchestra is good, as always.

the music contained on this cd is proof enough in and of itself that Arnold Schoenberg was a mediocre musical talent, and turned to composing in an alienist atonal style only after he could plainly see that he could not compete on tonal musical grounds with the likes of strauss, pfitzner, schreker, ravel, debussy, and the like. the man craved attention and success, and most of all, "historical significance" for himself, and therefore devised a system of composing that purposefully could not be understood, thus setting himself up as a pretended misunderstood "genius" in the romantic sense, and claiming that anyone who cried foul regarding his music was simply not sophisticated enough to comprehend his noise. Then he created a rigid mathematical system of organizing tones with no relation whatsoever to natural acoustics or the way human beings make sense of sound. If his ludicrous communistic regimentation of musical tones is not enough to prove that Schoenberg was a musical mediocrity at best, or incompetent at worst, then just listen to the garbage contained on this cd for confirmation.